Response Art Work

Forbidden City

1931
Oil on canvas
20” x 26”

Teng Hiok Chiu (1903–72)
From the collection of SPU Professor of International Business Joanna Poznanska and Kazimierz Poznanski

Forbidden City, once the Chinese imperial palace in Beijing, “is as complicated as Chinese philosophy, or love,” says Kazimierz Poznanski. That mysterious complexity — manifested in the unusual melding of Eastern and Western artistic styles and influences — is one
reason he and his wife, Seattle Pacific University Professor of International Business Joanna Poznanska, bought this painting. And it is one reason they have built up
an entire collection of the vibrant oils of 20th-century
Chinese modernist Teng Hiok Chiu.

Chiu, whose father was a Methodist minister, grew up in China as a Christian. He left China to study art, mainly in London, then moved to New England, where he spent most of his life. While Chiu’s paintings enjoyed enormous acclaim in the first part of the 20th century, his name eventually sank into obscurity. Poznanska and Poznanski rediscovered Chiu’s work and revived an interest in the artist, particularly with a 2003 retrospective at Seattle’s Frye Art Gallery.

According to Chiu in a 1928 magazine interview, “You may start from the East or from the West, with one or the other set of conventions, but if you really develop, you belong neither to the East nor the West. Art is a universal language which speaks to every human heart.”